At its heart, copyright has always been about preventing the spread of unauthorized copies of a work.

Now that digital copies of any work can be instantly shared, proliferating across the network like rabbits, the power of copyright has grown enormously in scope.

As only one example of the power of copyright in the digital age, Lessig points out that a teenager who downloads two copyrighted songs to his computer faces stiffer maximum penalties ($150,000 per song) than does a surgeon who accidentally amputates the wrong leg of his patient ($250,000).

Free Culture's central claim is that the control exerted by major media companies ought to be scaled back to a more sensible level, one that leaves more room for transformative works (such as Disney's) and creates a healthy public domain.

"The internet," writes Lessig, "should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright automatically applies, because it is less clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law."

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"I'm thrilled by this unexpected honor," Blume said. "We don't write hoping to win awards. We write because we have to -- because of a burning need to share our characters and stories." ///

The 66-year-old Blume has enjoyed enormous commercial success. Her books have sold more than 75 million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages. 

She also founded the Kids Fund, a charitable and educational foundation, and has served on numerous boards, including the Author's Guild and the National Coalition Against Censorship.

Blume is known for dealing explicitly with sex, religion and divorce and her books often have been placed in restricted sections of libraries or pulled altogether from shelves. 

She responded by editing the compilation "Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers," published in 1999.

According to the American Library Association, Blume's "Forever," the story of a teenage girl's feelings about sex and love, ranked No. 8 on the list of most "challenged" books of the 1990s. 

The ALA, which on Sept. 25 will mark its annual "Banned Books Week," defines a "challenge" as a formal, written complaint filed (usually by a parent) with a library or school.

Associated Press Sep 15 2004 // AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett

judyblume.com

Here are just a few of the things we've broadcast on our show that now could conceivably result in fines of up to a half million dollars for the 484 public stations that run the program: assorted curse words, people saying ''damn'' and ''goddamn'' (a recent F.C.C. decision declared that ''profane'' and ''blasphemous'' speech would now come under scrutiny); various prison stories; and a very funny story by the writer David Sedaris that takes place in a bathroom and that violates all three F.C.C. criteria for ''indecency.'' 

It's explicitly graphic in talking about ''excretory organs or activities''; Sedaris repeats and dwells on the descriptions at length, and he absolutely means to pander and shock. That's what makes it funny. 

Ira Glass- from his essay Howard and Me, NY Times May 9, 2004

Glass is host of the public radio program This American Life.

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Ironically, at the same time, Portland's "Everybody Reads" campaign is featuring Fahrenheit 451. It's amazing to think that with 451 in-print for over fifty years there would still be a mass movement to ban and censor media and literature. 

Thousands of books, from Huck Finn to Harry Potter, are still routinely banned in schools across the country. From a collectible standpoint, it only makes early editions of these titles more interesting to own.

A few books are musts in this category, representing watersheds in the history of literary censorship. James Joyce's most famous novel was banned in the United States for eleven years on the grounds that it may cause readers to have "impure and lustful thoughts."

Surprisingly, Nabokov's controversial masterpiece, Lolita, was never officially banned by the United States government. 

After being turned down by four American publishers, Olympia Press in France, who'd published such subversive writers as Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, and the Marquis de Sade, agreed to take a chance. 

Banned in France and New Zealand shortly afterward, it rose to the bestseller lists as soon as it hit American shores. 

In 1957 City Lights Bookstore proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted for refusing to discontinue sales of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

Naked Lunch was forced to defend itself on trial in 1965. An almost surreal "what is art" debate ensued and in the end, with a little help from its friends Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, Naked Lunch was ruled good, clean fun. 

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The imagination of teenagers is often - I'm tempted to say always - the only sure capital they possess apart from the love of their parents, which is a force far beyond their capacity to comprehend or control. 

During my own adolescence, my imagination, the kingdom inside my own skull, was my sole source of refuge, my fortress of solitude, at times my prison. ///

Like all teenagers, I provisioned my garrison with art: books, movies, music, comic books, television, role-playing games. 

My secret confederates were the works of Monty Python, H. P. Lovecraft, the cartoonist Vaughan Bodé, and the Ramones, among many others; they kept me watered and fed. They baked files into cakes and, on occasion, for a wondrous moment, made the walls of my prison disappear.

Given their nature as human creations, as artifacts and devices of human nature, some of the provisions I consumed were bound to be of a dark, violent, even bloody and horrifying nature; otherwise I would not have cared for them. 

Tales and displays of violence, blood and horror rang true, answered a need, on some deep, angry level that maybe only those with scant power or capital, regardless of their age, can understand. ///

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And so we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. 

As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.

from Op-Ed article "Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth" by Michael Chabon, New York Times, April 13, 2004 

novelist Michael Chabon is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001, and Wonder Boys - among other books

image from book At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror by H. P. Lovecraft

photo of Michael Chabon by Patricia Williams from aclu.org